The Hindu : Identity crisis

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Feb 17, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Identity crisis

By Malini Parthasarathy

To suggest today... that the religious minorities are guests in a "Hindu India"... is nothing but a subtle form of "ethnic cleansing".

IT IS disconcerting and deeply dispiriting to see how many otherwise liberal and self-described modern members of the upwardly mobile and Westernised middle classes in Indian society today have bought so easily into the fallacious and pernicious theories peddled by the merchants of Hindu majoritarianism. These theories are based on sheer falsification of the facts relating to the history of Indian civil society and the creation of the Indian nation-state in 1947. Any elementary familiarity with the rudiments of Indian history, just its factual framework, even setting aside the Hindutva campaign-sponsored controversy over interpretations of history, would underline again and again, how much a product of religious syncretism is the civil society that we call India today. Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim influences blended cheerfully in the social and cultural landscape of the subcontinent at least from the 13th century onwards even as Muslim and Hindu rulers periodically battled over symbols such as temples and mosques more as instruments of political power than religious significance. To suggest today, as the Sangh Parivar and its increasingly fervent following in the media and the Hindu upper middle classes are doing, that the religious minorities are guests in a "Hindu India" and therefore deserve lesser conceptual recognition in the delineation of India's national identity is nothing but a subtle form of "ethnic cleansing" albeit at the intellectual and ideological level.

This is probably why the Sangh Parivar is so insistent on rewriting the history books. It needs to blot out unwelcome reminders of alien cultural presences that have coexisted determinedly with Hindu culture for ages and to ensure that the idea of a single Hindu community being the dominant political, cultural and social presence is dinned into the minds of children so that future generations of Indians would have no qualms in seeing Indian as synonymous with Hindu and India with Hindu Rashtra. Even if as a political project it might be alright for the Sangh Parivar to imitate what has so often been loudly scoffed at by them, the totalitarian impulses that damaged Soviet and Chinese societies in the '50s and write Indian history as they would have liked it to have happened, there remains a nagging question. Is it fair to deprive Indian children of the overwhelming and richly textured wealth of information about India's multicultural past and syncretic traditions that is now available thanks to the painstaking research and substantive historiographical advances by so many world-class Indian historians whose methodology and techniques were in no way inferior to their acclaimed Western counterparts? It shows how low is our national sense of intellectual self-worth that we reduce D.D. Kosambi, Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and other historian-scientists to "left-wing" ideologues when their work, the envy of many a leading European historian, has taken the knowledge of India's past forward by leaps and bounds. If not for their meticulous scrutiny of historical records including agrarian tax and revenue documents, the sense of connectedness that today's India feels with the events that took place in the past in the subcontinent that did not have a territorial national identity until 1947 would not be a genuine one.

The irony is that the political entities called India and Pakistan that came into being in 1947 when the British left the subcontinent had no formal or institutional connection to the previous structures of rule of the subcontinent except for the fact that their people were the inheritors of the cultural and historical memories of generations who had lived on the same terrain. Therefore for any community, whether Hindu or Muslim, to claim that it enjoyed unbroken hegemony or had prior territorial claim of the subcontinent would be falsifying the actual social and political realities that unfolded over the centuries which saw Hindu and Muslim rulers vying with each other, often coopting each other against challengers within their own communities and collaborating eventually with British imperialism. Any scrutiny of the basic facts of Indian history would readily yield the conclusion that the sense of Indian nationhood was a late-born one, first taking shape in the colonial era and then acquiring moral and political resonance as a resistance movement against British imperial rule which, it is to be noted, took shape as a national movement claiming to represent the aspirations of all the religious, linguistic and ethnic communities that lived in the subcontinent. Whatever momentum the Indian nationalist struggle had that effectively dislodged the British from India, was due to the overwhelming moral authority of its representation of a broad sweep of communities in India.

It must also be recalled that in the traumatic aftermath of Partition, it was democratic and pluralism-affirming India which had the greater moral shine worldwide than Islamist Pakistan which by its communal origins deriving from the "two-nation" theory had already lost considerable ground in the international reckoning. It cannot now post-facto be wished away or written out of memory that when the new nation-state India adopted its Constitution, it determinedly enshrined a commitment to recognise that as citizens of the new democratic republic, all communities living in India, regardless of their numerical strength, would have their cultural and religious rights given equal importance before the law. It must also be recognised that there was no prior existence of the Indian state before the new governing entity that came into being in 1947. Both then and when it became a republic in 1950, the founders of the new state were clear that they would commit themselves resolutely to making India a secular state and a parliamentary democracy, which could effectively contain the undermining tendencies of majority and minority communalism and, equally important, the disintegrating tendencies of linguistic and ethnic affiliations.

On what basis then are the so-called Hindu nationalists demanding greater cultural space in India's national landscape? There is as yet no clear evidence presented to the country as to what in their view constitutes "appeasement" of the Muslim community whose members are as much Indian citizens, with as much right to cultural and social space within the Indian national fabric, nor is there any clearly discernible reason for the shrill panic being voiced over "forcible Christian conversions". It is all the more amazing that in the obvious absence of any marked sociological or demographic shift in favour of the Christian community at least in the last few decades, there is not enough scepticism among those self-proclaimed modern Indians who yearn to be part of the global community and not enough questioning by them as to why the issue of conversions has suddenly acquired so much urgency.

It is also surprising why the onus has not been placed on those campaigning for Hindu majoritarianism to explain the legal and ethical basis for the demand that minorities must be shown their place and must accept that India belongs primarily to the Hindus. Having now robbed Indians of the right to know their own history as it really was, it has become far easier for the Sangh Parivar and their patrons in the Vajpayee administration to manufacture a version of Indian history and nationhood that despite its patent inauthenticity paves the way for the creation of a new majoritarian-oriented political identity. So powerful an effect does this heady brew of Hindu nationalism have that inconvenient questions such as the prospect of a falling economic growth rate, down to 4.4 per cent, do not have to be answered. So effective is the demonising of the minority community in the narrative of Hindutva that only few ask whether it is wise to be perpetually confrontationist with our neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This has also helped to create uncritical acceptance of the Vajpayee administration's collaboration with the U.S.-led coalition and virtually no disquiet about the ethical and moral implications of the global war against terror. There is very little scrutiny too of the considerable domestic political stakes that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar have vested in the campaign to turn India into a Hindu nation.

Instead of heaping scorn and abuse on those of us who question India's lurch towards majoritarianism and its repudiation of the pluralism and democracy that has served it so well, it is time that those Indians who pride themselves on being part of the global community yet have bought unquestioningly the notion that the minorities are responsible for some imagined economic deprivation, ask some hard questions. By driving the minorities to the margins of a civil society of which they are equal inheritors and thereby polarising Indian society, rendering it more vulnerable to bitter internal conflicts, how can the dream of a modernising India becoming part of a wider global community sharing a vision of faster economic growth and greater prosperity really materialise?

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